This is the story of a trial. It is also a book about the Holocaust.
In July 1996 the British writer David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, for libel. Irving is the author of Hitler’s War, The Destruction of Dresden, and biographies of Erwin Rommel, Josef Goebbels, and Winston Churchill; his books telling the story of the Second World War from the German side have been praised by leading historians in Britain and the United States. In his massive study The Second World War, military historian Sir John Keegan calls Hitler’s War “certainly among the half dozen most important books” on the period. But to Deborah Lipstadt, Irving’s identification with his Nazi subjects went beyond scholarly empathy. In her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory Lipstadt portrayed Irving as a key figure in what she described as a movement to rehabilitate the Nazis by denying the historical reality of their crimes. In Lipstadt’s account, Irving bends historical evidence “until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda.” Far from being a reputable historian, wrote Lipstadt, Irving is an extremist and a liar, “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial.”
The trial began on January 11, 2000 at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. By suing in London, Irving put Lipstadt at a multiple disadvantage. Not only did she have to travel thousands of miles from home, she also had to fight her case without the benefit of the First Amendment. In an American court Irving would have to prove that what Lipstadt wrote about him was false; he also would have to prove that she knew it was false. In Britain the libel laws favor the person suing. Here it would be up to Lipstadt to prove that what she wrote was true. And since Irving claimed that he couldn’t be described as a “Holocaust denier” because the gas chambers themselves were a hoax, Lipstadt and her lawyers were, in effect, forced to prove the reality of the Holocaust.
This was a battle neither side could afford to lose. Irving, who represented himself, risked his reputation as well as his livelihood. Defeat would mean professional ruin, and probable bankruptcy. For Lipstadt and her British publisher (and co-defendant) Penguin Books, the stakes were even higher. Irving’s strategy of putting the Holocaust itself on trial meant that Lipstadt and her lawyers had to defend not just her veracity, but the integrity of all of those caught up in the Nazi onslaught. If David Irving won, a British court would have lent its imprimatur to his version of events, in which the survivors of Auschwitz are branded as liars, and the suffering of the victims of the gas chambers is simply erased from the pages of history.
How serious was the danger of this happening? Serious enough for Penguin Books to spend over a million pounds on lawyers’ fees, and hundreds of thousands more hiring expert witnesses. Serious enough for Steven Spielberg and a number of other American Jews to contribute to the cost of bringing Lipstadt to London for the three-month trial, and to the cost of hiring a prominent law firm to represent Lipstadt’s personal interest. Serious enough that, for those of us who sat through the whole trial, the outcome remained in doubt until the last day.
Libel defense in Britain is always an uphill struggle, and part of Lipstadt’s burden lay in having to prove things most of us take for granted: Adolf Hitler’s murderous intentions, the horrifying efficiency of the death camps, the fatal consequences for the Jews. But the very act of taking so much for granted conceals precisely those questions which Irving’s strategy was designed to provoke: How do we know these things really happened? What is the evidence? Who are the witnesses? How do we know they are telling the truth?
On January 27, 1945 the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. The camp itself was vast—a complex of barracks, factories, and satellite camps that covered roughly 15 square miles. At Auschwitz–Monowitz, a synthetic-rubber works, the Soviets found 600 slave laborers. (Among them was a young Italian Jew named Primo Levi, whose experiences would form the basis of If This Is a Man, one of the earliest, and most powerful, accounts of life in the camps.) At the main camp, there were 1,200 sick prisoners. At Auschwitz–Birkenau the Soviets found 32 enormous storage buildings burned to the ground. But in the four buildings that escaped the flames there were 348,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s garments, 13,964 carpets—and seven tonnes of human hair. Yet only some 5,800 sick prisoners remained. Whose clothing was this? Whose hair? Where did these mountains—of shoes, eyeglasses, false teeth, toothbrushes, children’s toys—come from?
The answer lay in ruins: four crematoria, dynamited by the retreating Germans, and within whose walls approximately one million people, most of them Jews, had been deliberately, methodically, gassed to death and then incinerated. What they found at Auschwitz stunned even the veteran troops of the First Ukrainian Front—but it did not come as a total surprise. The previous July the Soviet Eighth Guards Army captured Lublin, and in the suburb of Majdanek discovered a camp that the fleeing Nazis had been forced to abandon before it could be destroyed. In this much smaller compound the Red Army found furnaces and gas chambers still intact—and 820,000 shoes.
If experience had prepared the Soviets for what they would find at Auschwitz, ideology also played a part. In the German eagerness to extract everything possible from their prisoners, from the sweat of their labor down to the hair on their heads and the gold in their teeth, the Russians saw the logic of industrial capitalism reach its macabre denouement. These were not simple prison camps, or even concentration camps. These, proclaimed Pravda, were “factories of death.”
The West was not prepared. The first British reporter to visit Majdanek had his story spiked as “a propaganda stunt.” In the United States, the editors of Christian Century found the parallels between Majdanek “and the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale of the First World War . . . too striking to be overlooked.” Lacking both the ideology and the first-hand experience, most Western commentators dismissed contemporary reports of the Nazi genocide as either Soviet propaganda or Jewish exaggeration. Deborah Lipstadt’s first book, a scholarly study of this dismissal, is titled Beyond Belief.
It was as a corrective to such skepticism that General Dwight Eisenhower, deeply shocked by what he’d seen at Ohrdruf concentration camp, arranged tours of the camp for American Congressmen and newspaper editors. Eisenhower also sent photographs of the dead prisoners to Winston Churchill. As Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the other camps were liberated, a fuller picture began to emerge of the catastrophe which had struck European Jewry. Of the 8.5 million Jews living in Europe in 1939, fewer than three million were left alive. Thousands had died in uniform. A few hundred thousand managed to escape, mostly to the United States or Palestine or the Soviet Union. But the vast majority, between five and six million civilians—men, women, and children—had been murdered by the Nazis in their effort to eliminate European Jewry.
Most of those killed were not gassed. In the wake of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union some 1.3 million Jews, mostly Russians and Poles, were murdered by shooting. Their killers were sometimes members of the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units sent in behind the attacking Wehrmacht. But regular army units, police battalions, and reserve police battalions all participated in the slaughter. Other Jews were worked to death at Mauthausen, hauling boulders until they dropped. Still others were deliberately starved, or forced to live in typhus-infested ghettos and barracks until they succumbed. Toward the end of the war tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands were sent on forced marches through the wintry Polish countryside without food or adequate clothing. For the victims, at least, the manner of killing was ultimately of little consequence.
History takes another view. With 40 million dead, the Second World War was the greatest conflagration in the history of the planet. Perhaps half of these deaths were civilians: the Soviet intelligentsia targeted by the Einsatzgruppen along with the Jews; the Polish intelligentsia decimated first by the Soviets and then by the Nazis; Russian civilians killed by artillery barrage and starvation at Stalingrad or Leningrad; Chinese killed by starvation in Manchuria; Greeks killed by starvation in Athens; English, German, Polish, Japanese, and Chinese victims of aerial bombardment. Even the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it could be argued, differed from the dead of London or Hamburg or Rotterdam only in their number.
To attempt to construct a hierarchy of such suffering is obscene. Yet there are still distinctions to be observed—distinctions that shape both our view of the war and our response to its outcome. One such distinction is between the deaths of civilians, whether “inadvertent” or the result of a decision to terrorize the population, and the attempt to eliminate an entire population group. Not even those who see the bombing of Hiroshima (or Dresden or Coventry) as a war crime claim that they were intended to wipe out every Japanese (or German or Briton). There is also a difference—a technological difference and a moral difference—between the direct, one-at-a-time action of shooting and the diffusion of responsibility introduced by the gas chamber. A man who kills with a machine gun still has to pull the trigger. The gas chamber introduces a chain of fatality from the bureaucrat in Berlin to the policeman who rounds up the deportees to the soldier who unloads the train to the prisoner who conducts the victims to the undressing room to the guard who locks the door to the doctor who pours in the gas pellets. Which one is the mass murderer?
Of all the nations engaged in the Second World War, only the Nazis tried to eliminate a whole people. And only the Nazis used gas chambers. These stubborn facts mark out the Nazi regime as something apart, a phenomenon that can’t simply be weighed against the millions of Stalin’s victims or the consequences of British or American imperialism. As the totem of this singularity, the gas chamber is both the emblem of Nazi inhumanity and the ultimate obstacle to any rehabilitation of the Nazi period.
Hitler’s partisans have always known this. The Nazis themselves knew there was something different about the Endlösung der Judenfrage—the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Hence the strict secrecy: when Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor of Occupied Poland, tried to visit Auschwitz his car was stopped and he was turned back. Hence the deception: Auschwitz–Birkenau, the main killing center, was officially designated a camp for prisoners of war; Sobibór, a camp whose sole purpose was the killing of Jews, was officially labeled a transit camp. And hence the euphemism: in Auschwitz, the gas chambers and crematoria were known as Spezialeinrichtungen (special installations) or Bade-anstalten (bath houses); the killing itself was referred to as Sonderbehandlung (special treatment), the same term used for those shot by the Einsatzgruppen.
In the closing days of the war, and in the wake of the Soviet capture of Majdanek (which despite Western skepticism was still viewed as a propaganda disaster by Hitler), the Nazis raced to eliminate the evidence of what they had done. The camps at Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka had already been reduced to rubble. Documents were burned. The Sonderkommando—prisoners who disposed of the corpses, tended the crematoria, emptied the gas chambers—were executed.
Like the secrecy itself, this effort was not entirely successful. In the millions of pages of captured documents the euphemisms sometimes slip. On a very few occasions the perpetrators spoke frankly of their deeds. And despite their best efforts, the Nazis were not able to eliminate all the evidence. Or the witnesses. A handful escaped during the war. Many more—a tiny remnant of the total, but too many to ignore—survived. Their testimony, and the testimony of those perpetrators who confessed their crimes either at Nuremberg or at subsequent war-crimes trials, forms the core of what we know about what came to be called the Holocaust.
Since the end of the war scholars have labored to construct a complete picture of the disaster and to provide explanations for what happened. In recent years, for example, Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men have offered opposing views on why the men who engaged in mass shootings of Jews—many of whom were given the chance to excuse themselves—chose to participate. There are no proofs in historical explanation, and such debates may never be resolved. Nor will we ever know the names of all the victims—or of all the perpetrators. Still, Raul Hilberg’s magisterial The Destruction of the European Jews, first published in 1961 and subsequently expanded to three volumes as the passage of time has provided material for emendation, provides a remarkably comprehensive account. Hilberg, who fled Vienna with his parents in 1939, and served in the American infantry during the war, spent eight months at the War Documentation Project cataloguing captured Nazi archives. These, in conjunction with Nuremberg documents, were the basis of his research.
Hilberg lists the names of the men who designed Sobibór, the contractors who built Treblinka, and the chemist who supervised the killing at Belzec. He shows how the companies who manufactured poison gas divided the market, and explains how the two firms who collaborated on the building of the crematoria at Auschwitz parceled out the work. But in his description of the killing process, even Hilberg is forced to rely principally on eyewitness testimony.
“I’m not going to dispute most of what they say about the Holocaust,” David Irving told me before the trial began. By concentrating his attack on the gas chambers at Auschwitz Irving hoped to present himself as a reasonable man with reasonable doubts. Irving knew that if he succeeded—if his doubts about the reality of the gas chambers were accepted as reasonable—the road would then be open not just to a normalization of our view of the Nazi regime, but to a broader revision of our understanding of what was at stake in the Second World War. He also knew that by focusing specifically on the gas chambers he was, in evidentiary terms, picking the opposition’s weakest point.
A lot of what we know about Auschwitz comes from trials. The transcript of the Nuremberg Tribunal alone, for example, takes up 42 volumes, with additional volumes devoted to exhibits and evidence. Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant, was tried at Nuremberg. After his conviction he was extradited to Poland, where a separate trial devoted to Auschwitz was held. Dr. Jan Sehn, a judge of the Cracow court, led a year-long forensic investigation that brought together the confessions of Höss and other perpetrators with the testimony of numerous victims and those camp archives which had escaped destruction. Adolf Eichmann, described by Höss as “the only SS officer who was allowed to keep records” concerning liquidations, was captured in 1960. In 1972 the Austrians finally got around to trying Walther Dejaco, the man who designed the gas chambers. There was even an Auschwitz trial in England.
If you go into a bookstore today and pick up a copy of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, you will find the following description of life in Auschwitz: “Here in block X, Nazi doctors Wirths, Schumann, and Clauberg kept the human raw material for their pseudo-scientific experiments. Polish prisoner Dr. Wladislaw Dering performed castrations and ovariectomies ordered by his German masters as part of their insane program to find a way to sterilize the entire Jewish race.”1
But if you go to a library, and look in the first edition, the wording is slightly different: “Here in block X, Dr. Wirte [sic] used women as guinea-pigs and Dr. Schumann sterilized by castration and X-ray and Caluberg [sic] removed ovaries and Dr. Dehring [sic] performed seventeen thousand ‘experiments’ in surgery without anaesthetic.”2 As Nazi war criminals, Wirths, Schumann, and Clauberg were in no position to object to Uris’s description of their activities. In 1947 Wladislaw Dering had also been listed as a war criminal by the Polish authorities, but by the time Exodus was published he was practicing medicine in London after 10 years in the Colonial Medical Service, where his work had earned him an OBE.3
Dering sued Uris and his British publisher for libel, claiming that as a Polish prisoner he had no choice but to follow the Nazi doctors’ orders. Dering, who’d been second-in-command of the camp’s nationalist Polish underground, also maintained that the dossier which Uris had essentially transcribed into his novel was based on information from Polish Communists and vengeance-crazed Jews. He admitted performing forced sterilizations on Jews, but said these had only been a tiny fraction—about a hundred—of the 17,000 operations he’d performed at Auschwitz. He also claimed he’d used a proper anaesthetic.
The defense made extensive use of witnesses, including several of Dering’s victims. A prisoner–doctor who had refused to perform sterilizations—and who was not punished for her refusal—also testified. The witness accounts were sometimes contradictory, and in the end the jury found that Uris was unable to prove that what he’d written was true. The novel QB VII is Uris’s own fictionalized account of the affair.
The judgment against Uris proved a pyrrhic victory since the same jury awarded Dering only a halfpenny’s damages—at the time the smallest coin in circulation—and decreed he should pay his opponent’s costs, which even in the 1960s ran to tens of thousands of pounds. But a pyrrhic victory for Irving would still be a disaster for his opponents—and a huge boost to those who, under the guise of historical revisionism, seek to rewrite the history of the Second World War, recasting Nazi genocide as a regrettably harsh response to Jewish oppression.
The gas chambers were not an issue in the Exodus trial. Nor was the existence of the gas chambers an issue at the trial of Walther Dejaco and Fritz Ertl, his collaborator in designing the crematoria at Auschwitz–Birkenau. Though their names are on the blueprints, and Ertl admitted he knew the designs were for “special actions”—a phrase whose real meaning he also admitted knowing—the Viennese court found neither man guilty.*
By suing Deborah Lipstadt for libel, David Irving hoped to make the existence of the gas chambers an issue, a controversy, an occasion for doubt. Of course everyone knows millions of Jews really did die in the gas chambers, not just at Auschwitz, but at Dachau and Belsen. The problem is, what everyone knows about the Holocaust isn’t always true. There was a gas chamber at Dachau, but it was never used. There were no gas chambers at Belsen.
For a long time everyone knew the Nazis made soap from the fat of murdered Jews. In its first reports on the extermination camps in November 1942 the New York Times quoted Dr. Stephen Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress, who claimed that the bodies of the dead were being exploited for soap, fat, and lubricants.4 In the Polish town of Piotrkow, as the transports of Jews passed through the town the locals would say “Jada na midlo.” (“They travel on their way to soap.”) After the war, the municipal museum in Prague displayed a bar of soap it said had been made from Jewish corpses.5 It wasn’t. The grisly tale of human beings rendered into soap, though it figured in some of the earliest accounts of events inside Nazi-occupied Europe, has long been rejected by historians as a recycled leftover from the First World War, when similar atrocity stories were staples of Allied propaganda.6
And we all know about the brave King of Denmark, who, after his country was occupied by the Germans, threatened to put on the yellow star himself if the Nazis insisted on imposing the badge on Danish Jews. As the historian Martin Gilbert writes in Holocaust Journey: “The King, and his people, courageously arranged for most Danish Jews to be smuggled across the water to Sweden on the eve of the planned deportation. But the episode with the yellow star never took place.” The source for this inspiring but inaccurate episode: Uris’s Exodus.7
The Danish King’s gesture, though mythical, has become one of the “lessons” of the Holocaust, its parable of personal solidarity often serving as the uplifting counter to the German pastor Martin Niemöller’s somber postwar confession: “First, they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew. . . .” Niemöller’s litany of indifference to the escalating brutality of life in Nazi Germany is one of the texts of our times, quoted by Republicans and Democrats, Jews and Christians, Time magazine and the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. All of these versions agree: first, they came for the Jews. Only they didn’t. And Niemöller never claimed they had.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany, “first, they came for the Communists”—a circumstance acknowledged by Niemöller, who actually went on to say:
but I was not a Communist—so I did nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat—so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew—so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me.8
Why would so many sources mistakenly put the Jews first? Why would the version enshrined in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum neglect to mention Nazism’s first victims, the Communists? Perhaps because arguments about the Holocaust have always been about politics as well as history.
In The Drowned and the Saved Primo Levi recalls the taunts of a guard at Auschwitz:
Even if someone were to survive, the world will not believe him. There will be perhaps suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers [camps].9
In 1987 Levi fell to his death.
Who will write the history? Even while it was still going on, knowledge of the Holocaust was influenced—one is tempted to say fatally influenced—by the uses to which such knowledge might be put. It is now beyond doubt that both the British and the American governments knew at least the magnitude of the Jewish catastrophe, if not the precise means involved.10 There were other, perhaps understandable reasons for keeping silent: the need to safeguard the fact that the Allies had broken Germany’s codes, the probability that such “atrocity stories” wouldn’t be believed, the fear that any move to rescue the victims would divert resources needed to defeat Germany on the battlefield. But there was also the fear that a campaign to persuade Germany to expel the Jews, rather than murder them, might succeed. In July 1944, when Jewish groups in Britain pleaded for the government to do something to stop the extermination of Hungarian Jewry, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison warned Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden it was “essential that we should do nothing at all which involves the risk that the further reception of refugees here might be the ultimate outcome.”11 Until the establishment of the War Refugee Board, very late in the war, American policy was little better.
Anti-Semitism was one factor that shaped how the facts of the Holocaust became known. Anti-Communism was another. During the war this meant refusing to acknowledge the reality of what the Red Army had discovered at Auschwitz and Majdanek. After the war, during the Cold War, it meant a resistance to Russian insistence on commemorating the “crimes of Fascism”—and suspicion toward anyone too eager to divert attention away from the more pressing struggle against Communism.
But if the fear of being considered insufficiently anti-Communist (or too zealously anti-German, at a time when Germany had been welcomed back in the Atlantic Pact) inhibited Jews from drawing attention to the Holocaust, Zionism gave many Jews a reason, and a license, to speak out. This was true both in Israel, where there was some effort to turn the disaster into political capital, and in the United States, particularly after the Six Day War, when support for Israel became a cornerstone of American strategic thinking in the Middle East, and when a mention of the Holocaust served both to ward off criticism of Israeli policy and to bolster claims that in the emerging “victimization Olympics,” Jews had already been awarded the gold medal. Peter Novick’s recent The Holocaust in American Life is a brilliant account of this transition from censorship to stridency.
Like all the Holocaust trials that came before it, David Irving versus Penguin Books Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt is an argument about history, about what the Nazis did or did not do, and what did or did not happen in Auschwitz and elsewhere. Each side has its own reasons for pretending this is not so. Irving claims he is in court only to defend his reputation; the defense say the issue is Irving’s veracity, not history. But Irving has used his reputation, his credibility as a historian, to advance the proposition that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz, which was merely a slave labor camp whose total of fatalities is dwarfed by the toll of Allied bombers over Dresden or Pforzheim. Anyone who claims differently, says Irving, is either a dupe or a liar. It is that thesis, and not any other errors or deceptions in his writing, that brought him to Lipstadt’s notice in the first place. It is that thesis that brought the two of them to court. And it is that thesis that ensures that what happens in this London courtroom would be reported around the world.
The trial itself, however, poses other questions. Epistemological questions: Where does our knowledge of the past come from? How is it transmitted? Do documents deserve greater weight than the testimony of witnesses? If we use what we know about an event to interpret a document, yet we need the document to understand the event, what does this hermeneutic circle say about our ability to understand the past? If not all interpretations are equally valid, yet there is no inherent standard of validity, on what grounds can any interpretation be ruled out?
It also raises political questions: Is the Holocaust the property of the Jews? Does a history of persecution create any entitlement—for example, to legal protection from those who would deny that history? What is the proper response to hate speech? What is the connection between Fascism and anti-Semitism? What is the connection between hate speech and racial violence? Is the protection of free speech always a good thing?
The trial raises questions for Jews: Is the Holocaust important for Jewish identity? How important? Why should we care if Irving, or anyone else, wants to argue it didn’t happen? Why should anyone else care? How do Jews see themselves in relation to other groups in society?
And for non-Jews: How much does the Holocaust matter? Why? How should we respond to Jews who feel threatened? How should we respond to Jews who feel threatened by David Irving? How do we see Jews in relation to other groups? How did the Nazis see Jews? How do we feel about the implied comparison?
And of course the trial poses—indeed, in some respects hinges on—questions about historiography, about how history is written. Many of these are technical, the historian’s equivalent of malpractice: questions about footnotes, translations, sources, statistics, the suppression of conflicting evidence. There are questions about history as a discipline: What are the standards of acceptable conduct? Who sets them? Who enforces them? Are they the same for all kinds of history? Does one position, however outrageous (for example the belief that the Holocaust was a hoax), taint a historian’s entire body of work? Or can it be isolated, set to one side like a piece of spoiled fruit?
Alongside all these questions, though, is the fundamental challenge that haunted Primo Levi: Who will write the history? History, the cliché tells us, is written by the winners. Yet the history of the Holocaust is a history without winners. The Allies may have defeated the Nazis, but they did not save the Jews.
Who will write the history? Every Holocaust trial offers a partial answer to that question, and the trial that is the subject of this book is only the most recent in a long series. There may well be others. But it is also something new: a Holocaust trial without victims and without perpetrators, a trial in which history is judged, as well as made.